Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Europe Is Not Ready for the Next Migration Surge

The refugee crisis is subsiding. The political crisis is still going strong.

December 15, 2017 at 7:00 AM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Stuck.
Photographer: Boris Horvat/AFP--Getty Images

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Though the flood of immigrants in 2015 and 2016 has subsided, Europe is ending the year without having prepared for the next migration wave. Meanwhile, many immigrants are languishing.

This year, German refugee applications declined to levels not seen since 2014. Greece and Italy, which bear the brunt of migrant arrivals across the Mediterranean have also gotten a little more breathing space.